Zingo, Bingo, Bango: Meeting David Lynch
Thank you for creating the Peaks tv that opened the door to peak TV
Watching Twin Peaks each week as it took over TV was… a revelation.
Yes, David Lynch’s movies were incredible. But they didn’t change movies. Twin Peaks opened the door to “peak tv.” And it felt weirdly Canadian or Canadianly weird. Also, the log lady…
I was lucky enough to interview David Lynch at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival when he was launching Mulholland Drive - which was originally envisioned as a Twin Peaks spinoff featuring Audrey Horne.
I remember being floored that he spoke like he’d just moved out of Mayberry (that’d be a really old TV reference). Also, he really wanted to hustle his website.
In a separate interview, when I met his movie’s stars I made sure to ask a few questions about being Lynched. When I interviewed Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring they decided that, while we talked, it’d be fun (or maybe more Lynchian?) to roll around together on the bed in the hotel room they were doing interviews in as they answered my questions.
And when I was interviewing Sissy Spacek for another movie at the festival I asked her about Lynch too…
“Oh, lots of things surprise me, but the surprises come by going into the unknown. So when you get ideas sometimes they can be very surprising and thrilling.”
TORONTO -- David Lynch isn’t weird enough to be a David Lynch character – at least not according to the actors who work with him.“
People think because he makes these weird dark and twisted films, he must be really intense and brooding, but he’s not that at all,” claims Mulholland Drive’s mysterious blonde bombshell Naomi Watts. “He’s a really affable, joyful, charming charismatic person.”
Laura Elena Harring, the brunette bombshell in Lynch’s attempt to give Sunset Boulevard the Twin Peaks treatment agrees. “He speaks like he’s from another era. “I’ll be ding-danged,” she says, switching from her slightly Mexican accent to imitate Lynch’s mid-west drawl. “He’s so funny. He says,” and she switches back to the drawl, “Holy jumping George.” He’s” she searches for the description a moment, then smiles. Cornball.”
Watts instantly agrees. “He’s a cornball!”
The dark genius behind Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks is a cornball?
That’s pretty much how Sissy Spacek, who starred in Lynch’s strangely normal film, The Straight Story, describes him. “He’s heaven. He has been a dear friend for many, many years and I always wanted to work with him and I never imagined that it could be so much fun. He’s just delightful on set. He’s kind and generous and he knows exactly what he wants,” says Spacek.
“I could only say, who know what lurks in the recesses, the deep dark recesses of a person’s mind? But he’s the boy next door and working with him was just wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.”
The bio in the press kit for Mulholland Drive simply reads: “David Lynch (Director) Born in Missoula, Montana. Eagle Scout.”
During a twenty-minute interview the Eagle Scout never said “Holy Jumping George” or that he’d be “ding-danged” but he did let loose with two “Zingos” a “Bingo” and a “Bango.”
Okay, I’m surprised. But what surprises the big screen’s master of the sharp left turn?
“Oh, lots of things surprise me, but the surprises come by going into the unknown. So when you get ideas sometimes they can be very surprising and thrilling.”
Are these ideas from the unknown or just unconscious?
“No. It’s conscious at a certain point because the ideas pop in but it’s like a.” He searches for the simile but that idea isn’t within reach. “It doesn’t have to be sitting in a chair but sometimes it happens that you sit in a chair with a desire to catch ideas and you find yourself, it’s like daydreaming, you’re going along thinking about this or that and Bango something’ll fly in. And it wasn’t there and now it’s there. How does that happen?”
And Lynch grins like, well, a cornball.
“I tell this story that I read about (inventor) Nikola Tesla. In the story, as I remember it, he’s sitting on a park bench and he’s looking at the sky and Zingo! In comes the alternating current generator motor. Every wind of wire, every screw -- and the knowledge of how it works. All he had to do was go back and build it. And it’s like where did that thing come from? That’s the way ideas come.
“And like chairs. You’re going along and Zingo! you get an idea for some design for a chair that’s so thrilling to you. All you’ve got to do is build it. And so these ideas they come, they don’t always come fully formed, they never hardly ever come fully formed, just fragments at first but fragments that are so thrilling that you kind of start falling in love with them. And then more pieces come and a story starts to form and then you’re set. All you gotta do is stay true to the ideas as you move forward.”
Lynch says it doesn’t surprise him when people “don’t get” his films – which isn’t an unlikely response to Mulholland Drive which takes a 360 degree spin and turns itself inside out over halfway through the movie after a character discovers a blue box – but that does“hurt” him because he thinks people who claim not to understand his work are lying. At least to themselves.
“I think they do understand it and I think, learning from listening to reactions, you sort of see two different types of people. Real literal minded people and people that love to kind of go into another world and just kind of roll with the flow. And the literal-minded people —generally speaking – don’t trust their intuition and they do have an understanding -- but they kind of want it to come in a literal way. And if they sat down and started talking they would realize they knew way more than they give themselves credit for. And the other people – enjoy experiencing things. They don’t demand a pat explanation, even though there is one. They kind of love getting lost in an abstraction. I’m more of the get lost in an abstraction type person.”
He’s also a get lost in the idea type person. “It starts from the ideas. Sometimes the ideas are a character. You’ll be going along and Bingo! - some character will appear and start talking and they talk in a certain way. And it’s all like it existed and you’re just the radio and picking up on it.”
Lynch says that’s how his two female lead characters became lovers in Mulholland Drive – it’s just where the characters wanted to go. He also claims that Mulholland Drive’s temperamental director, played by Justin Theroux, isn’t a stand-in for him or his own feelings towards Hollywood executives – and that the moment where Theroux takes his golf clubs and tees off on an executive’s car was inspired by a legendary Jack Nicholson tantrum and not his experiences with network and studio bosses.
It wouldn’t be surprising if Lynch did have the urge to attack an executive’s SUV –especially an executive at ABC TV where Mulholland Drive started life back in 1998 as a series pilot. The network that had allowed him to develop the ground-breaking surreal soap opera Twin Peaks invited him to create a new Lynch landscape for the 21st century.
Lynch moved his sensibility to Hollywood and shot the pilot but Mulholland Drive hit a dead end in the fall of 1999 when post-Columbine paranoia convinced studio executives that bizarre violence was no longer the best way to sell socks and detergent.
Lynch admits it was liberating to move his story from TV to film but claims, “It really needed to go in that direction first.” Then he grins. “I’m so thankful to ABC for hating it.”
He’s also thankful to Studio Canal for the risk they took buying the project from ABC– especially when he didn’t have a clue how he was going to take an idea that was meant to stretch out over at least a TV season and wrap it all up in two hours.
Prior to crashing with Mulholland Drive, Lynch had vowed never to work in TV again. Is he renewing his vow of Tele-chastity? “I think so, but they say never say never and I’m a sucker for a continuing story and TV – maybe the only good thing about it -- is the opportunity for a continuing story.”
Lynch is also creating a new continuing series online @ Davidlynch.com where he’s learning to tell stories in five-minute segments for the wired world. Talking about the Internet, Lynch sounds so geekishly enthusiastic it’s almost, yes, cornball. “It’s a place for freedom,” say Lynch ever-so-Microsoftly. “A world that didn’t exist and now it’s huge.” Zingo!
